Tennyson died on Thursday, October 6th, 1892, and was buried in the Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey, next to Robert Browning, and near the Chaucer monument. Against the pillar close by the grave has been placed Woolner’s well-known bust. The monument erected to the memory of the poet on Beacon Hill, near Freshwater, was unveiled by the Dean of Westminster on August 6th, 1897.
Alfred Tennyson (from the painting by Samuel Laurence)
see [page 5]
With regard to the portraits of Tennyson reproduced in these pages, perhaps those of chief interest in addition to the Cameron photographs already referred to are the paintings by Samuel Laurence, executed about 1838, and the three-quarter length by G. F. Watts, now in the possession of Lady Henry Somerset. Of the former Fitzgerald wrote:
“Very imperfect as Laurence’s portrait is, it is nevertheless the best painted portrait I have seen; and certainly the only one of old days. ‘Blubber-lipt’ I remember once Alfred called it; so it is; but still the only one of old days, and still the best of all, to my thinking.”
Alfred Tennyson (from the painting by G. F. Watts in 1859)
see [page 23]
The Watts portrait, according to Mr. Watts-Dunton, possesses “a certain dreaminess which suggests the poetic glamour of moonlight.” The same writer asserts that “while most faces gain by the artistic halo which a painter of genius always sheds over his work, there are some few, some very few faces that do not, and of these Lord Tennyson’s is the most notable that I have ever seen among men of great renown.”